The New England Town Meeting

Author : Joseph F. Zimmerman
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313003637
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The New England Town Meeting written by Joseph F. Zimmerman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-03-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, Zimmerman explores the town meeting form of government in all New England states. This comprehensive work relies heavily upon surveys of town officers and citizens, interviews, and mastery of the scattered writing on the subject. Zimmerman finds that the stereotypes of the New England open town meeting advanced by its critics are a serious distortion of reality. He shows that voter superintendence of town affairs has proven to be effective, and there is no empirical evidence that thousands of small towns and cities with elected councils are governed better. Whereas the relatively small voter attendance suggests that interest groups can control town meetings, their influence has been offset effectively by the development of town advisory committees, particularly the finance committee and the planning board, which are effective counterbalances to pressure groups. Zimmerman provides a new conception of town meeting democracy, positing that the meeting is a de facto representative legislative body with two safety valves—open access to all voters and the initiative to add articles to the warrant, and the calling of special meetings to reconsider decisions made at the preceding town meeting. And, as Zimmerman points out, a third safety valve—the protest referendum—can be adopted by a town meeting.

Author : Frank M. Bryan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226077985
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Real Democracy written by Frank M. Bryan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them. A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy. Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.

Author : Graham Smith
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521514770
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democratic Innovations written by Graham Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-02 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines democratic innovations from around the world, drawing lessons for the future development of both democratic theory and practice.

Author : Jonathan Beecher Field
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452962383
Total Pages : 98 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation written by Jonathan Beecher Field and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Author : John Gould
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 72 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New England Town Meeting written by John Gould and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Kenneth A. Lockridge
Publisher : New York : Norton
ISBN 13 : 9780393053814
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A New England Town written by Kenneth A. Lockridge and published by New York : Norton. This book was released on 1970 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : David D. Hall
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 0807837113
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Reforming People written by David D. Hall and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revelatory account of the people who founded the New England colonies, historian David D. Hall compares the reforms they enacted with those attempted in England during the period of the English Revolution. Bringing with them a deep fear of arbitrary, unlimited authority, these settlers based their churches on the participation of laypeople and insisted on "consent" as a premise of all civil governance. Puritans also transformed civil and criminal law and the workings of courts with the intention of establishing equity. In this political and social history of the five New England colonies, Hall provides a masterful re-evaluation of the earliest moments of New England's history, revealing the colonists to be the most effective and daring reformers of their day.

Author : John Frederick Martin
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 146960003X
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Profits in the Wilderness written by John Frederick Martin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In examining the founding of New England towns during the seventeenth century, John Frederick Martin investigates an old subject with fresh insight. Whereas most historians emphasize communalism and absence of commerce in the seventeenth century, Martin demonstrates that colonists sought profits in town-founding, that town founders used business corporations to organize themselves into landholding bodies, and that multiple and absentee landholding was common. In reviewing some sixty towns and the activities of one hundred town founders, Martin finds that many town residents were excluded from owning common lands and from voting. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, when proprietors separated from towns, that town institutions emerged as fully public entities for the first time. Martin's study will challenge historians to rethink not only social history but also the cultural history of early New England. Instead of taking sides in the long-standing debate between Puritan scholars and business historians, Martin identifies strains within Puritanism and the rest of the colonists' culture that both discouraged and encouraged land commerce, both supported and undermined communalism, both hindered and hastened development of the wilderness. Rather than portray colonists one-dimensionally, Martin analyzes how several different and competing ethics coexisted within a single, complex, and vibrant New England culture.

Author : Edward Rodolphus Lambert
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History of the Colony of New Haven written by Edward Rodolphus Lambert and published by . This book was released on 1838 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Sumner Chilton Powell
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819572683
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Puritan Village written by Sumner Chilton Powell and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Winner: “A meticulous and remarkably detailed account of the early government and social organization of the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts.” —Time In addition to drawing on local records from Sudbury, Massachusetts, the author of this classic work, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, traced the town’s early families back to England to create an outstanding portrait of a colonial settlement in the seventeenth century. He looks at the various individuals who formed this new society; how institutions and government took shape; what changed—or didn’t—in the movement from the Old World to the New; and how those from different local cultures adjusted, adapted, competed, and cooperated to plant the seeds of what would become, in the century to follow, a commonwealth of the United States of America. “An important and interesting book . . . to the student of institutions, even to the sociologist, as well as to the historian.” —The New England Quarterly